Snoo ‘Smart’ Baby Bassinet Sees Key Features Paywalled, Loses Functionality If Bought Used

For many many years now we’ve noted how internet-connectivity (and greed) have changed the consumer equation sometimes for the worse, resulting in people no longer truly owning the things they buy. Expensive gadgets can become less useful (or bricked completely) in an instant due to an inconveniently timed merger, company closure, greed, or just rank executive incompetence.

Case in point: owners of the $1700 Snoo “smart” baby bassinet (a crib with speakers that can rock and play soothing sounds for your baby) weren’t keen to find out that over the summer the company paywalled many of the Snoo’s “premium features” behind a $20 monthly subscription fee tethered to the device’s smartphone app.

Customers who bought a Snoo from an “authorized” outlet before July 15, 2024, were able to get the premium features free for nine months. But if you bought the speaker used, your only option to get the device’s full array of features is to shell out an additional $20 each month — on top of the $600 to $1000 the devices sell for used.

Ars Technica notes that users are, needless to say, not enthused about the changes:

“Just saying. This is bullshit. The current owners and users of Snoo should have been grandfathered in and continue to have access to basic feature like motion lock (the one I use most) and future new accounts should get a clear notification that without paying $20/mo they’re just buying a $2,000 basket.

Time to review bomb their app.”

As a result, the company’s app has been receiving a beating on app stores, with users noting that not only are the changes terrible for customers, they weren’t communicated clearly. The Snoo parent company Happiest Baby Inc. is also taking a steady beating over at the Better Business Bureau.

Companies think they’re cleverly boosting revenues by paywalling features or penalizing used owners, but they’re just taking an axe to the foundations of previously popular brands, especially if they’re too greedy with monetization or don’t explain the changes with any coherence.

Of course it’s a problem that’s soaring among small and big companies alike; Amazon is also taking heat this week for removing a key feature of its Echo Show 8 — the ability to display digital photos — and replacing them with ads. “Smart” sous-vide machine maker Mellow has also been taking a beating the last month for suddenly making its device useless unless users downloaded an app and paid a monthly fee.

I suppose executives making these kinds of decisions think they’re cleverly monetizing existing sales in creative new ways, but they’re really just burning consumer trust to the ground. And it’s not clear how many stories like these you’ll have to see before execs figure out its a pointlessly destructive affair.